The Showdown: How was this year’s E3?

With E3 2007 now complete, Ben and Frank reflect on the highs and lows of the …

Ben: We're back from E3, and now that we've had a chance to take a shower, get a good night's sleep, and write up most of our impressions, it's easier to look back on the show in its entirety. I've already put most of my thoughts into the E3 postmortem, but I think it's worth going back to talk about some of the best things we saw.

One of the things I was most impressed with was that I saw many more good games than I saw bad ones; I walked away with a huge list of games I want to continue to cover. I loved Bioshock, but we only got to play a little bit. I loved the Wii Zapper, but a lot of people had mixed feelings about it. I thought NiGHTS by Sega looked great, but unfortunately we couldn't play it. Picking an absolute favorite is going to be tough, but Portalcomes pretty close. I had a chance to play that on the PS3 and they had to tear me away. I was less impressed by Heavenly Sword, although some members of the press got a private demonstration that was apparently more polished than the demo we saw at Barker Hangar.

Sony's invitation-only gaming lounge at the Le Merigot was very impressive, though, and Everyday Shooter and Home both looked great when I got to try them. While I still don't think Home is for me, Sony showed it off to great effect at E3. I think it's going to be huge.

Frank: Your mention about the differences between the show-floor version and private meeting version of Heavenly Sword is something I want to talk about. One of the biggest story points that came out of this year's E3 was the show itself, and as such we've said a little bit about how the new format worked out. With regard to the demos, though, it was a little discouraging that there were so many different types of demos available at the different areas; just because you played X demo at Y location doesn't necessarily mean it was the same demo at Z, and that's frustrating.

Dewy's Adventure, for example, had one demo at Konami's private booth that was disappointing and another demo at the Hangar that was much better; and this wasn't an isolated incident. Makes it hard to narrow down a selection, given that I wasn't able to see everything in its fullest capacity. But I digress.

Narrowing it down to one "be-all, end-all" best from the show is a tough challenge. Super Mario Galaxy stole my heart, and the fact that I got to play it for as long as I did was a rarity afforded by the new format of the show. The Wii Zapper was the hotness too; you can't appreciate it until you play Ghost Squad with it. Watching Mass Effect playable was pretty cool as well, especially so in such an intimate setting with the president of the company. And echochrome... if there's one game that could completely shatter my love for the XBLA, that would be it. Same goes for Everyday Shooter. Imaginative and original titles like this are worth ten or twenty generic arcade ports, and I was incredibly happy to see Sony stepping up its game on this front.

Ben: I saw some great stuff at private meetings, and some bad stuff. Take LucasArts. They had a good show with new videos of Force Unleashed and Fracture, but at their private meeting I was shown videos and given feature lists. I learned two things: I'm really interested in their upcoming games, and I could have done this coverage from the hotel room. That was frustrating. The thought I kept getting was that a lot of this stuff I could have gotten from a press release and an asset disc, two things you received walking out of most of the press conferences.

Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft, at least, all did a good job of selling you on their games. Each one had the producers and developers available for questions, and the time you spent with a game was intense, with opportunities to ask plenty of questions to people who could get you good answers, or who worked on the game themselves. That's when the show really did a good job, when developers and publishers understood that the one-on-one time with games was when they could get the good press. I'm going to remember and like your game a lot more if you let me play it, and if I can talk to someone, that's even better.

Midway did a great job on this with our demo of Unreal Tournament III. We got a chance to get a good look at the game, and the producer we spoke to knew the game inside and out and his enthusiasm was clear. This was someone honestly excited about the game talking about what makes it great, and moments like that happened often.

Frank: There was some stuff that we played hands-on that I really wasn't too keen on, though, so it's definitely a double-edged sword. Boogie, even with the hilarious French rep who made me sing "U Can't Touch This" for the EA party, just wasn't that great; no amount of great public relations work can change that fact.

And what about the hands-off for Call of Duty 4 at the Barker Hanger? You can play it right in front of me and tell me all about it, but without me actually getting my hands on it, I'm not about to grin too much over something that has the most minimal demonstration of what we've already seen in the trailer. At least in the case of Mass Effect and Army of Two, we were shown things that hadn't yet been demonstrated. Overall, though, I think we saw some great software at this year's E3. Was it the ultimate explosion of new content and games? No, but there was enough stuff there to get me excited about the PS3 and enough stuff to keep my continued interest on the other consoles.